Whippleshield Books Update

It’s only five weeks until Christmas, and six until the end of the year – and there’s plenty happening at Whippleshield Books mission control.

Apollo Quartet
I’ve ordered proof copies of the second edition of Adrift on the Sea of Rains, so that’s on track for a mid-January release. The new editions are being printed through CreateSpace, so they’ll be available on Amazon – but I’ll also order some stock for sale through the Whippleshield Books online shop.

I’m currently working on The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself second edition. Because CreateSpace won’t put text on the spine unless a book is over 101 pages, I’ve had to expand each book. Increasing the font size, unfortunately, didn’t get them to the required page-count… So in each one I’ve added an excerpt from the book following, and there’s also a new essay ‘Genesis of Apollo’ about each story’s origin.

The fourth and final book, All That Outer Space Allows, is going to be a novel, with a projected word-count of around 50,000 words. Everything is currently on track to have the writing completed before Christmas. Here’s the blurb that’s going on the back-cover:

It is the Sixties and Ginny Eckhardt is a science fiction writer. She’s been published in the big sf magazines and is friends with many of the popular sf authors of the day. Her husband, Walden, has just been selected by NASA as one of the New Nineteen Apollo astronauts, which makes Ginny a member of the Astronaut Wives Club. She is fascinated by the realities of spaceflight, and would dearly love to train as an astronaut alongside her husband. But although she is one of a small group of women close to the US space programme, it is still barred to her – and her science fiction offers little consolation.

Aphrodite Terra
I had to put this on hiatus for several months while I worked on other projects. I suspect I won’t be able to get back to it until early in the New Year, for an anticipated February launch date. That’s a slippage of six months – it just proved impossible to get it done for last summer as I’d originally planned. Hopefully, it will be worth the wait.

The future
I have plans for another two books, an anthology and a collection, but no publication date yet. The first is a pendant to the Apollo Quartet, specifically to the final book. And the second is a reprint collection of my alt-space stories, and I’m waiting for them to all see print first. I’m also tempted to publish another limited edition chapbook… as I have this 10,000-word dark fantasy I can’t find a home for…